A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

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Friday, September 4, 2015

SE HABLA ESPANOL

Once again the cry goes up in Republican circles for people
living in this country to speak English.The same people who are unnerved by anyone
who dresses differently or has a different skin tone or worships a different god
are driven to despair by the realization that some of their neighbors actually
speak a different language.I think it
might be useful to recall a little history.

Let us begin with the founding of the American
Republic.Some of you may be surprised
to learn that in the late eighteenth century, a lively debate took place
concerning what ought to be the new nation's official language.English was of course a popular option, but
in some colonies, such as Pennsylvania, German gave English a good run for its
money .There was even a small town that
decided a new nation needed a new language, and went about creating an entirely
new tongue for the fledgling Republic [I do not actually know their creation,
but I suspect it was not much more imaginative than Pig Latin.Making up a really new language is rather a
difficult task, as J. R. R. Tolkein could have attested.]

In the latter nineteenth century, immigrants from Southern
and Eastern Europe began to pour into the United States.They tended to settle in welcoming
neighborhoods, with the result that entire areas were completely dominated by
new arrivals speaking something other than English.In the big cities of the Northeast, there
were Italian neighborhoods, Polish neighborhoods, and German
neighborhoods.Everyone was Roman
Catholic, of course, but in the neighborhood churches, the sermons were
preached in Italian, Polish, or German.[This was well before Vatican Two, so the Mass itself was celebrated in
Latin no matter what the neighborhood.]

The transformation of newcomers to "Americans" has
tended to be a three generation process.The first generation -- the adults who got off the boats at Castle
Garden or Ellis Island, continued to speak their mother tongues, shopping in
local grocery stores in Italian or German or Russian, or Chinese, and learning
no more than a few words of English in many cases.The mother tongue was spoken at home, so the
children grew up learning it fluently, but in order to make their way in
school, they had to master English.They
quite often married the sons or daughters of immigrants from different
countries, to the great distress of their parents, so they in turn spoke
English at home, even though they spoke German or Italian or Chinese when they
took the grandchildren to see the old folks.Their children -- the third generation -- were native English speakers
and very often knew no more than a few words of the traditional language.

When my grandfather, Barnet Wolff, ran for office on the Socialist
Party ticket, his schedule of appearances was listed in The Call, the leading English language Socialist newspaper.The paper listed him as speaking sometimes in
English and sometimes in "Jewish" -- what we would call Yiddish.Other candidates were announced as speaking
in Italian, for example.Readers of The Call could choose the street corner
that suited their linguistic preferences.

This has been the story of America from its founding and
before.The current nativist abhorrence
of Spanish-speaking Americans is both ugly and ignorant.Donald Trump's mother was born in
Scotland.His father's parents were
German immigrants.Piyush Jindal, who
goes bythe name of Bobby, was in utero when his parents immigrated
from India [thus making him an anchor baby.]Rick Santorum's father came to America at the age of seven from
Italy.Only the Native Americans can lay
claim to being indigenous, and even in their case, of course, the migration was
just a trifle earlier.

4 comments:

On behalf of the people of Scotland, I sincerely apologise for Donald Trump.We're a small nation, just five million people. That's mainly attributable to our well known diaspora, through coercion, force and more latterly economic aspiration. I suppose we were bound to throw up one bad apple now and again. Sorry :-(

There were a lot of German speakers in colonial America and there were delegates from Pennsylvania that tried unsuccessfully to get federal documents published in German as well as English but I think even in Pennsylvania the English-only types were always in firm control. People often forget that the celebrated Franklin said things like this (who knew Germans were so swarthy!):

“Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?” (The Papers of Benjamin Franklin Ed. Leonard W. Labaree. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959. vol 4:234).

The worst example though came in post-WWI Iowa when the governor (William Harding) proposed and helped pass a law ("Babel Proclamation") that forbade any speaking of a foreign language in any public conversation. That "law" was repealed half a year later.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.